California ‘Bullet Train’ is Dead/ Never-Trumper Now Backs Trump

Nikitas3.com has written repeatedly over the past few years that a high-speed passenger train line being built to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco is a massive boondoggle that will suck taxpayers dry while offering nothing even vaguely near the service that its backers promised.

Even worse the line would cover 520 miles to connect the two cities through a more populated, but less direct route, than the straight-line route of 350 air miles or 382 miles by car or bus.

I asked repeatedly: How do you “save energy” going one-and-one-half times the distance?
Well, you don’t and the project is finally dead after less than 5% of it was completed. Fox News reported:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on (February 12) he is pulling the plug on the state’s massive high-speed rail project from Los Angeles to San Francisco that was more than a decade behind schedule and billions in the red.

“Let’s be real,” Newsom said in his first State of the State address. “The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency.”

Newsom added that while California has “the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield,” “there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A.”

The embattled $77-billion bullet train has been an embarrassment for the Golden State and has been plagued by problems almost from the start.

The idea, long championed by Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, is years behind schedule with the latest estimate for completion set for 2033.

This cancellation is a major story after the media hyped the project for years, but you won’t see much about in the Fake News media. It is also very good news. It once again exposes the ‘green’ fraudsters for who they really are. Nikitas3.com believes that every single item in the ‘green’ agenda from solar panels to windmills to spiral light bulbs to recycling to high-speed passenger trains is a costly hoax being foisted on the public by ignorant and greedy environmentalists.

This California project was being promoted as the ultimate model for American high-speed passenger trains. You can be sure that America’s train nuts are in a deep nationwide funk today.

This cancellation could not come at a worse time for the outrageous ‘Green New Deal’ plan that Democrat congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is proposing. Part of her plan was to literally eliminate air travel and to put travelers on high-speed trains instead.

So why on earth would we shut down an airline system that is working perfectly well and making a profit in favor of passenger trains that cannot even be built in the first place as a result of their exorbitant taxpayer-funded costs?

The answer is clear. Bye-bye Bullet Train! And hello common sense…

Conservative Never-Trumper Now Backs the President

Breitbart News reported about conservative Never Trumper Erick Erickson, an influential figure in American politics:

Erick Erickson, editor of the Resurgent and a leading Never Trumper who voted third-party in 2016, announced Monday in a column that he would throw his full support behind President Trump in 2020.

“I will vote for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. And, to be clear, it will not be just because of what the other side offers, but also because of what the Trump-Pence team has done. They’ve earned my vote,” he wrote.

Erickson argued that the president is not perfect but that the president has delivered on his promises. He wrote:

Some of my concerns about President Trump remain. I still struggle on the character issue and I understand Christian friends who would rather sit it out than get involved. But I also recognize that we cannot have the Trump Administration policies without President Trump and there is much to like.

President Trump delivered on tax reform. He delivered on regulatory rollbacks. He delivered on undermining Obamacare. He delivered on moving the embassy in Israel. He delivered on withdrawal from the Paris Accord. He delivered on withdrawal from the Iranian agreement. He delivered on shifting American foreign policy focus to the Western Hemisphere to deal with Venezuela, Cuba, and other hotspots. He delivered on solid executive appointments, including to the judiciary.

Erickson went on to call the Democrats “too extreme” for the nation.

OK, this looks like the first tree to fall for the 2020 presidential election. Apparently some of these Never Trumpers, including Never Trump conservatives like Erickson, are finally recognizing how wrong they have been. And Erickson is a major conservative figure with a big following and he is eating a lot of crow publicly to say what he is saying.

This indeed is the beginning of 2020. Nikitas3.com wrote recently that the president’s State of the Union address on February 5 was his first campaign speech of 2020, and he got sky-high approval numbers for that speech. Six days after the speech the Rasmussen poll, famous for accuracy, put the president at a whopping 52% approval.

And thus Nikitas3.com believes that more and more voters, including Never Trumpers, are falling in line for 2020 and are going to continue to do so.

Meanwhile the infamous Mueller investigation has turned up nothing on Russia. And when millions of voters come to realize that they were not only wrong but that they have been duped by the Democrats and the Fake News media Nikitas3.com believes that there will be another big uptick in the president’s approval numbers.

In short Nikitas3.com believes that a ‘cascade effect’ is building on behalf of the president, with more and more Americans getting on the president’s side. And that if it continues then the president will be unstoppable in 2020.

It is important to remember that Donald Trump won the presidency with a big cloud over his head. The Fake News media smeared him mercilessly, he was perceived as having a flawed character, and tens of millions of Americans did not trust him, did not like him and did not believe that he would do any of the things that he promised.

Yet these voters have seen amazing results in just two years; Trump has fixed the economy (the #1 issue), re-negotiated trade deals to benefit US workers, expelled thousands of MS-13 criminals, put America first in every way, expanded the US military, urged North Korea toward peace, obliterated ISIS, built some of the border wall with more coming, withdrew from the Paris ‘climate’ scam, rolled back useless regulations, and given hope to millions of people who had lost all hope under Obama.

And this is just the beginning of the list…

The Democrat nominee will be another crucial factor in 2020. Serious observers don’t see much Trump-toppling potential on the Democrat side in candidates like Spartacus, Pocahontas, Amy Klobuchar or Kamala Harris. These are not serious candidates. Trump would clobber any one of them.

Then we must consider what happened at the Grammy music awards on February 10 which featured a cameo appearance by Michelle Obama. The crowd went nuts showing that liberals are desperate for someone whom they can rally behind enthusiastically in order to win in 2020.

And if Michelle Obama runs for president – which she may, but it is not likely – it is being said that she would dominate the field and certainly be the nominee.

But Nikitas3.com believes that she is just another celebrity Democrat like Oprah Winfrey and that voters would sour on her after serious public scrutiny and vigorous challenge from Trump.

Michelle Obama is well known and liked on the left but she has no governing experience. The only jobs that she has ever had were working in local government in Chicago. She has never been elected to any public office and is famous only for her marriage to her husband.

Nikitas3.com believes that president Trump would fearlessly take her down with one simple sentence like: “Do you want to go back to The Bad Old Days of Obama with low-paying jobs, anemic growth, war in the Middle East and $4 a gallon gasoline?”

There is a parallel here from the past. Conservative Republican president Ronald Reagan first won election in 1980 under similar circumstances as Trump did. One-term sitting Democrat president Jimmy Carter had driven the economy into a ditch, and the Iranian hostage crisis had dragged on for a year. Americans were not feeling good about anything.

Reagan was initially given no chance of winning (like Trump) but he ended up trouncing Carter, taking 44 electoral states and 91% of the Electoral College votes on promises to renew the national spirit, the US military and the economy. That sounds like Trump in 2016.

Reagan then implemented reforms that produced an economic expansion that lasted up until 2008 and set the stage for the collapse of America’s #1 enemy in the world, the communist Soviet Union.

When president Reagan ran for re-election in 1984 he called his campaign ‘Morning in America’ and asked one simple question in a quiet, thoughtful voice: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

The answer for most Americans was a resounding “Yes” and Reagan won 49 out of 50 electoral states and 98% of the Electoral College votes (525 out of 538 electoral votes).

And while president Trump will never do that well due to political shifts his campaign will focus on the economy and Democrats already are getting nervous about the mere 270 electoral votes that Trump needs to win. Look at this from Fox News:

During an interview with HBO’s John Oliver, the anti-Trump late night host Stephen Colbert asked (Oliver) if he’s “feeling good” going into what could be the final two years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Oliver, whose HBO show “Last Week Tonight” returns this week, replied: “I definitely don’t have that kind of optimism. To say we’re halfway through his presidency I think is to ignore the concept of second term possibility. We are two to six years away from the end of his presidency.”

Oliver is a far-left Trump-hater and for him to be saying that Trump may be re-elected is as revealing as Never Trumper Erick Erickson finally seeing the light, i.e., things are starting to simmer for 2020 and the pundits are starting to get serious about a possible Trump re-election, which Nikitas3.com is predicting.

Here is more from Erick Erickson:

We have a (Democrat) party that is increasingly hostile to religion and now applies religious tests to blocking judicial nominees. We have a party that believes children can be murdered at birth. We have a party that would set back the economic progress of this nation by generations through their environmental policies.

We have a party that uses the issue of Russia opportunistically. We have a party that has weaponized race, gender, and other issues to divide us all while calling the President “divisive.” We have a party that is deeply, deeply hostile to large families, small businesses, strong work ethics, gun ownership, and traditional values. We have a party that is more and more openly anti-Semitic.

… the daily litany of misreported and badly reported stories designed to paint this Administration in a negative light continues to amaze me.

Juxtapose the contrast in national reporting on the President and race or Brett Kavanaugh and old allegations with the media dancing around the issues in Virginia. Or compare and contrast the media’s coverage of the New York and Virginia abortion laws with their coverage of this President continuing the policies of the Obama Administration at the border, including the Obama policy of separating children from adults. Or look now at how the media is scrambling to cover for and make excuses for the Democrats’ ‘Green New Deal,’ going so far as to suggest that maybe, just maybe, the outline of policy initiatives was an error or forged.

In fact, many of my center-right friends who, like me, continue to have concerns with this Administration, are driven in part by the bad reporting on this Administration.